Q4 2024 Informatica Inc Earnings Call
and Michael McLaughlin.
Kate: Good afternoon and thank you for joining the Informatica Inc. Fiscal Q4 2024 call. My name is Kate and I will be the moderator for today's call.
Speaker Change: At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode and will be until the question-and-answer portion of the call. If you would like to queue up for a question, you may do so by pressing star followed by a 1 on your telephone keypad. I will now turn the call over to Victoria Hyde, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please proceed.
Victoria Hyde: Thank you, Kate. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining Informatica's 4th Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call.
Speaker Change: Joining me today are Amit Walia, Chief Executive Officer, and Michael McLaughlin, Chief Financial Officer.
Speaker Change: Before we begin, we have a couple of reminders. Our earnings press release and slide presentation are available on our investor relations website at investors.informatica.com. Our prepared remarks will be posted on the IR website after the conference call concludes.
Speaker Change: During the call, we will be making comments of a forward-looking nature.
Speaker Change: Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied as a result of various risks and uncertainties. For more information about some of these risks,
Speaker Change: Please review the company's SEC filings, including the section titled risk factors, including in our most recent 10-Q and 10-K filing for the full year 2023.
Speaker Change: These forward-looking statements are based on information as of today and we assume no obligation to publicly update or revise our forward-looking statements except as required by law.
Speaker Change: Additionally, we will be discussing three non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures are in addition to and not a substitute for measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP.
Speaker Change: A reconciliation of these items to the nearest U.S. gap measure can be found in this afternoon's press release and our slide presentation available on Informatica's Investor Relations website. With that, it is my pleasure to turn the call over to Amit.
Amit Walia: Thank you, Victoria, and welcome to everyone on the call. 2024 was a pivotal year for Informatica in our cloud-only consumption-driven strategy. While we experienced overall momentum throughout the year, the fourth quarter did not unfold as anticipated.
Speaker Change: I will briefly explain why and ask Mike to provide additional details.
To begin with, renewal rates were lower than forecast.
Speaker Change: As we work through the complexity of our business model transformation to cloud only, some execution issues related to renewals were identified and are underway to be addressed. We have allocated customer success resources to this initiative and expect to resolve it throughout 2025.
Speaker Change: Second, we saw a significant re-acceleration of cloud modernization deals this quarter and closed a record year for on-premises to cloud migrations.
Speaker Change: This development in itself is very positive for the long term, as it creates more upsell and cross-sell opportunities for services on the IDMC platform. However, it has two short-term dynamics.
Speaker Change: Lower net new ERR due to the accounting treatment of the subscription credits we give customers during the migration period.
Speaker Change: and the roll-off of migration-related self-managed subscription ERR and maintenance ERR, which was higher than expected.
Speaker Change: Finally, we saw a reduction in the renewal term length for self-managed subscription contracts. While this does not affect ARR, it negatively impacts GAAP revenue due to ASC 606.
Speaker Change: This mainly arises from customers eager to start their cloud journey with us more quickly. It is happening faster than we anticipated, which is a positive sign again in the long term for our cloud business, but it negatively impacts gap revenue due to ASC 606 in the short term.
Speaker Change: These factors, along with lower professional services and foreign exchange headwinds, led to outcomes that did not meet our forecast.
Speaker Change: As Mike will explain in greater detail when he provides 2025 guidance, we are adjusting our expectations to account for these factors and our growth and profitability projections.
Speaker Change: Before turning to results, I'd like to take a minute to frame Informatica in the broader context of where we've been and where we are going.
Speaker Change: For those who have been with us since Informatica went public, we are now in the final phase of a transformation.
Speaker Change: When Informatica became private in 2015, we set out to create the most innovative solutions on the industry's first and only cloud native data management platform.
Speaker Change: We achieved this goal and started selling our IDMC platform alongside our on-prem solutions a few years later. At the beginning of 2023, we marked the start of the final phase of our transformation strategy by announcing the end of sale of our on-prem products, fully committing to a cloud-only consumption-driven future state.
Navigating this third phase has been challenging at times.
Speaker Change: Sometimes, the aforementioned factors, the underlying health of our cloud business and our cloud-only consumption-driven strategy remains very strong. Our large, high-growth cloud business is very healthy, even with our declining end-of-sale on-prem business.
to give you a few examples.
Speaker Change: In Q4, cloud subscription ERR grew 34% year-over-year, representing nearly half of our total ERR.
Speaker Change: We expect cloud subscription ARR to hit the 1 billion mark in 2025, accounting for almost 60% of total ARR by the end of the year.
Speaker Change: In Q4, approximately 68% of cloud net new ARR in the trailing 12 months came from new cloud workloads and expansion, with approximately 40% of that growth coming from new customers to Informatica.
Speaker Change: We continue to expect the majority of our cloud growth to be net new wins for new cloud workloads amongst new and existing customers.
Speaker Change: Our cloud net retention rate was 124% in the quarter, and we continue to see a healthy cloud pipeline.
Speaker Change: Cloud customer count grew by 8% for the year, and the number of Cloud ERR customers spending more than a million dollars with Informatica grew by 59% year over year. The average Cloud ERR per customer was $335,000, growing 24% year over year.
Speaker Change: We closed a record year of on-prem to cloud migrations, which grew 42% year-over-year, with interim expansion sales of IPOs nearly doubling.
Speaker Change: We won net new cloud deployments with some of the world's largest customers, including a U.S.-based financial services company and an online travel technology company, expansion opportunities with Takeda, Axis Bank, Lumen, and Yamaha, and more decision deals with the city of Austin.
to name a few.
Speaker Change: All of this was accomplished while delivering strong profitability. Full year 2024 non-GAAP operating income grew 16% year-over-year and adjusted non-labour-free cash flow after tax grew 28% year-over-year.
Speaker Change: We continue to remain the innovation leader in the data management market. We have built the best data management products on the only AI-powered data management platform, supporting extremely difficult, operational, complex workloads, and use cases that are multi-vendor, multi-cloud, and hybrid.
Speaker Change: are positioned as the customer platform of choice for cloud data management is supported by industry recognition.
Speaker Change: including being named a leader in the inaugural 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data and Analytics Governance Platforms Report and being named a leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools for the 19th consecutive time.
Speaker Change: We deeply engage with our ecosystem and hyperscaler partners, including over 650 GSI partners, enhancing their practices on IDMC, issuing over 15,000 certifications in 2024, up from 12,000 the prior year.
Speaker Change: Lastly, we remain confident in pursuing a $62 billion addressable cloud market, according to IDC, and in our ability to successfully capture this opportunity through product innovation with our comprehensive IDMC platform with ClearAI and GenAI capabilities.
Speaker Change: At the end of 2024, the ID&G platform processed over 110 trillion cloud transactions per month, which grew over 29% year-over-year.
Speaker Change: With our enterprise customers, we empower them to use AI for data readiness and simplify the data state with Informatica for Gen AI and Gen AI from Informatica, which are both available on the platform.
Speaker Change: With Informatica for Gen-AI, we now have about 100 customers using Gen-AI capabilities on IDMC. IDMC capabilities these customers use for Gen-AI include data ingestion and processing, including unstructured data processing for RAG pipelines, connectivity to LLMs, and AI app orchestration.
Speaker Change: Informatica has previously announced AI blueprints for all hyperscalers, plus Snowflake and Databricks. Over the last four months, these customers have executed 270,000 calls or prompts to LLMs, excluding Clare GPT.
Speaker Change: Use cases we are seeing include business process optimization and automation, business insights and decision support, sentiment analysis, enterprise data retrieval and augmentation, to name a few.
to give you some great real-life customer stories.
Speaker Change: One is a leading global biotech company which is building an AI agent framework with IDMC and Google Cloud, enabling users to quickly gain insights from internal systems.
Speaker Change: Utilizing IDMG's out-of-the-box recipes for rapid deployment or development, these accelerate access to data-driven insights, enhancing decision-making, and speeding up business outcomes.
Speaker Change: An insurance company is using our solutions for claim analysis and claim processing. A healthcare company is using Informatica products for patient engagement with the holistic health and program support.
Speaker Change: A California-based nonprofit is developing a RAAG solution using local community data and resources powered by OpenAI and IDMC. This helps support center executives access relevant resources quickly, reducing cost and enhancing service quality.
Speaker Change: These are all pilot programs and will move to production over time.
Speaker Change: With Genii from Informatica, we recently expanded ClearGPT services across EMEA, Asia Pacific and Canada, and 10% of our customers are now using ClearGPT outside the United States.
Speaker Change: We are pleased to announce the extension of ClearGPT services at no additional cost throughout 2025. This continuation of our 2024 promotion demonstrates our commitment to providing advanced AI capabilities while maintaining cost-effective solutions for our customers.
Speaker Change: Our product innovations are expanding on the IDMC platform with AI and Gen AI capabilities. And we look forward to sharing more at our Informatica World Customer Conference in May.
Speaker Change: In closing, we achieved significant progress in 2024. While we have much to execute in 2025, as we look to scale to a billion-dollar cloud ARR business, I am incredibly proud of the Informatica team.
Speaker Change: I would like to thank our partners, customers, and shareholders for their ongoing support. With that, let me turn the call over to Mike. Mike, please take it away.
Mike: Thank you, Amit, and good afternoon, everyone. The fourth quarter of 2024 did not meet our expectations with key metrics falling short of our forecast.
Mike: Before diving into the numbers, I'd like to begin my remarks with a high-level discussion of the factors driving the myths. While the fundamentals of our cloud business remain strong, multiple factors did not play out as we expected.
Mike: First, our renewal rates were lower than forecast. What we refer to as natural churn, which excludes the impact of customer migrations, increased by roughly two percentage points versus our forecast for both cloud and self-managed subscriptions, and by approximately one-half percentage point for maintenance.
Mike: Second, we saw a significant re-acceleration of cloud modernization deals this quarter. As a result, the contribution of on-premise-to-cloud modernization deals, as a percentage of total new cloud bookings, was significantly higher than expected.
Mike: Modernization deals were over one-third of our new cloud bookings in Q4, compared to the mid-20s in prior quarters.
Mike: While this result is consistent with our long-term cloud-only strategy, and a good thing overall, in the short term, it results in lower net new ARR because of the accounting treatment of the maintenance and subscription credits we give to our customers during the migration period.
Mike: The third key driver of lower-than-forecast total ARR in Q4 was higher-than-expected roll-off of modernization-related self-managed subscription and maintenance ARR. This reflected the success of our customer cloud modernizations being completed on time, which is a positive long-term trend.
Mike: In addition to these three factors that impacted ARR, GAAP revenue was further impacted by a greater-than-forecast reduction in renewal term length for on-premise self-managed contracts.
Mike: We saw this happening in Q2 of this year, and we reduced our revenue forecast at that time to reflect the trend. But, in Q4, the average renewal term length continued to decline more than we expected.
Amit Walia: As Amit mentioned, we believe this reflects the fact that more of our customers are beginning to plan for modernization of their on-premise data workloads, which we expect will be positive for us in the future.
Speaker Change: Finally, lower-than-forecast professional services revenues impacted GAAP revenue and unfavorable effects due to the strengthening of the U.S. dollar in November were a headwind to both GAAP revenue and ARRA.
Speaker Change: So with that, now let me get to the Q4 numbers, starting with total ARR.
Speaker Change: Tolera finished the year at 1.73 billion, an increase of 6.1% over the prior year, which was 1% below the midpoint of our guidance.
Speaker Change: The growth was driven primarily by new cloud workloads and strong cloud net expansion with existing customers, as well as accelerated migrations from our on-prem base to cloud.
Speaker Change: Foreign exchange rates negatively impacted total ARR by 2 million on a year-over-year basis for the fourth quarter and 3.8 million on a year-over-year basis for the full year
Speaker Change: Next, cloud subscription ARR was $827 million, a 34% increase year-over-year.
Speaker Change: Cloud subscription ARR now represents 48% of total ARR, up from 38% a year ago.
Speaker Change: This result was about $9 million below the midpoint of our October guidance, primarily driven by the lower renewal rate of cloud subscriptions this quarter and the higher-than-expected contribution of on-prem-to-cloud modernization deals as a percent of total new cloud bookings this quarter.
Speaker Change: Approximately 68% of cloud subscription net new ARR in the trailing 12 months came from new cloud workloads and expansion, with approximately 40% of that growth coming from new customers to Informatica.
Speaker Change: Modernizations accounted for 32% of our trailing four-quarter cloud subscription net new ARR, up from 24% last quarter.
Speaker Change: Our cloud network retention rate was 124% in the quarter, and our cloud gross renewal rate was in the low 90s. Foreign exchange negatively impacted cloud subscription error by $716,000 on a quarter-over-quarter basis and $1.9 million year-over-year.
Speaker Change: Self-managed subscription ARR, which we no longer actively sell, declined in the quarter to 447 million. This was down 5% sequentially and down 13% year over year due to the effects of natural churn and the roll-off of migrated on-prem workloads to the IDMC cloud platform.
Speaker Change: The third component of total ARR is maintenance for on-premise perpetual licenses sold in the past, which now represents 26% of total ARR.
Speaker Change: Maintenance ARR was down approximately 9% year-over-year to $451 million, a somewhat greater decline than we expected. Most of the greater-than-forecast decline was due to more roll-off of modernization-related ARR as projects were completed.
Speaker Change: The natural churn rate of maintenance was slightly higher than forecast, about 50 basis points.
and Michael McLaughlin.
Speaker Change: Subscription ARR, which is simply the sum of cloud subscription ARR and self-managed ARR, grew 13% year over year to 1.274 billion. As we indicated last quarter, beginning in Q1, we will no longer provide summary subscription metrics, including ARR, customer count, and renewal rate.
and Michael McLaughlin.
Michael McLaughlin: Modernizing our on-prem customer base to Informatica's IDMC is an important part of the strategy.
Michael McLaughlin: As of the end of Q4, 9.4% of our maintenance and self-managed ARR base has been modernized to the cloud, or is in the process of modernizing, up from 6.8% last quarter. We have a life-to-date average 1.9 ARR uplift ratio on these modernizations, down from 2.0 last quarter.
Michael McLaughlin: Over the past four quarters, our average modernization uplift ratio was 1.7. This reflects a lower average uplift ratio for PowerCenter Cloud Edition modernizations, which were over 80% of modernization deals in Q4.
Michael McLaughlin: We had been expecting this decline in the average uplift ratio, and we expect it to decline a bit more in 2025 to approximately 1.5 to 1.7.
Michael McLaughlin: We are very comfortable with this lower uplift ratio, as we have found that cloud modernizations typically drive significant net expansion sales up front, have healthy expansion in term, and they have better renewal rates than non-expansion, than non-modernization new deals.
Michael McLaughlin: Now I'd like to review our revenue results for the fourth quarter.
Michael McLaughlin: Gap total revenues for the fourth quarter of 2024 were $428 million, a decrease of 3.8% year-over-year.
Michael McLaughlin: Foreign exchange rates positively impacted total revenues by approximately $1.3 million on a year-over-year basis, but FX was about a $2 million headwind to revenue compared to our forecast FX rates at the beginning of the quarter.
Michael McLaughlin: Total revenues were approximately $30 million below the midpoint of our October guidance due to four primary factors. Lower upfront revenue per ASC 606 accounting standards for self-managed subscription renewals due to the lower than expected renewal rate.
Michael McLaughlin: Lower average duration of self-managed subscriptions that did not renew, that did renew.
Michael McLaughlin: lower professional services revenue, and the strengthening of the U.S. dollar in November.
Michael McLaughlin: Cloud subscription revenue is approximately 187 million or 44% of total revenues, growing 33% year over year. As a reminder, due to the timing difference between revenue recognition and ARR, the relative growth rates of these two metrics will differ from period to period.
Michael McLaughlin: Self-managed subscription support and license revenue, combined, was $111 million or 26% of total revenue and declined 32% year-over-year.
Michael McLaughlin: As mentioned before, the impact of upfront revenue recognition of the license component of our on-premise contract renewals and new bookings has a significant impact on our reported gap revenue.
Michael McLaughlin: In order to help provide more clarity to investors on the impact of this upfront recognized revenue, we've added a new table to our investor materials which breaks out the upfront ASC-606 revenue from our radibly recognized soft core revenue.
Michael McLaughlin: As you'll see from that table, upfront recognized self-managed revenues declined by $46 million versus Q4 2023, and for the full year, upfront recognized revenue declined by $73 million.
Michael McLaughlin: We will be providing this disclosure of upfront recognized versus readily recognized revenue every quarter going forward in our investor materials and in our 10-Ks and 10-Qs.
Thank you.
Michael McLaughlin: Maintenance revenue was $111 million and represented 26% of total revenue for the quarter. The maintenance renewal rate was 92%, down about 3 percentage points year-over-year, and 2% versus last quarter. This renewal rate decline was primarily due to greater-than-forecast modernization roll-off.
Michael McLaughlin: Professional services revenues, which includes implementation, consulting, and education, we're down about $1.3 million year-over-year to $20 million. As a reminder, our implementation services revenue has been declining as our services partners assume a greater share of that work for our customers, and we expect this trend to continue in 2025.
Michael McLaughlin: Turning to geographic distribution of our business, U.S. revenue declined 6% year over year to approximately $264 million, representing 62% of total revenue.
Michael McLaughlin: The decline in U.S. revenue growth is primarily attributable to the year-over-year decline in self-managed license and support services. International revenue declined 1% year-over-year to $164 million, representing 38% of total revenue.
Michael McLaughlin: Now I'd like to move on to our profitability metrics. Please note I will discuss non-GAAP results unless otherwise stated.
Michael McLaughlin: In Q4 our gross margin was 84%, one half percentage point higher year over year. We remained focused on maintaining healthy gross margins as our business transitions to the cloud.
Michael McLaughlin: Operating expenses were lower than our forecast for the quarter, but operating income was below the midpoint of our October guidance by approximately $10 million due to lower revenue.
Michael McLaughlin: Operating margin was 37.9%, a 150 basis point improvement from a year ago. For the full year 2024, operating margin improved by 380 basis points over the prior year.
Michael McLaughlin: The Justin Diva dollar was $166 million and net income was $129 million. Net income per diluted share was $0.41 based on approximately 314 million outstanding diluted shares. Basic share count was approximately 305 million shares.
Michael McLaughlin: Adjusted unlevered free cash flow after tax was $180 million, $24 million above the midpoint of our guidance, primarily due to lower cash taxes than forecast and unrealized FX gains on U.S. dollar cash balances held in foreign subsidiaries. Cash paid for interest in the quarter was $32.5 million, consistent with expectations.
Michael McLaughlin: I'd like to provide an update on our share repurchase activity. During the fourth quarter, we spent $103 million to repurchase 3.8 million shares of Class A common stock at an average price of $26.66 through open market purchases.
Michael McLaughlin: Additionally, from January 1 through February 12, we spent $27 million to repurchase another 1.1 million shares at an average price of $25.36.
Michael McLaughlin: In total, we have reduced our total share count, as of yesterday, by about 1.6% as a result of these repurchases.
Thank you for tuning in.
Michael McLaughlin: And earlier this week, our board approved an additional $400 million stock repurchase authorization, bringing the total authorization to $800 million.
Michael McLaughlin: Taking these repurchases into account, we have $670 million remaining available under our $800 million share repurchase program. We intend to continue repurchasing our shares in the open market for the remainder of this quarter, targeting similar dollar volumes as last quarter.
Michael McLaughlin: We ended the fourth quarter in a strong cash position with cash plus short-term investments of $1.2 billion, an increase of $240 million year-over-year, net debt was $591 million, and trailing 12 months of adjusted EBITDA was $551 million. This resulted in a net leverage ratio of 1.1 times at the end of December.
Now, I'll turn to 2025 guidance.
Michael McLaughlin: Based upon the dynamics we saw unfold in our business at the end of Q4, we have lowered our forecast for 2025 relative to our prior expectations.
Michael McLaughlin: We set our forecast and guidance assuming lower renewal rates than we had previously expected for self-managed cloud and maintenance.
Michael McLaughlin: higher on-prem to cloud modernization deals as a percent of our total cloud bookings, a slightly lower average modernization uplift ratio, shorter self-managed renewal term length, and the continued decline of professional services.
Michael McLaughlin: These changes to our forecast assumptions result in total ARR and total gap revenue growth several points lower than we had previously planned. And our operating income and free cash flow margin will not expand as expected due to lower revenue.
Michael McLaughlin: We expect total ARR and total revenue growth to increase in 2026, but not to the levels provided in the medium-term guidance we first offered at the end of 2023. We are not providing new medium-term guidance at this time, but we expect to do so later this year.
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Michael McLaughlin: Taking all this into account, we are establishing the following guidance for the full year ending December 31st, 2025. Note that all growth rates refer to the midpoint of the guidance range.
Michael McLaughlin: We expect GAAP total revenues to be in the range of $1.67 billion to $1.72 billion, representing approximately 3.4% year-over-year growth, or approximately 4.6% on a constant currency basis.
Michael McLaughlin: We expect total ARR to be in the range of $1.755 billion to $1.795 billion, representing approximately 2.9% year-over-year growth, or approximately 3.2% on a constant currency basis.
Michael McLaughlin: We expect cloud subscription ARR to be in the range of $1.019 billion to $1.051 billion, representing approximately 25.1% year-over-year growth, or approximately 25.3% on a constant currency basis.
Michael McLaughlin: We expect non-GAAP operating income to be in the range of $546 million to $566 million, representing approximately 3.5% year-over-year growth.
Michael McLaughlin: And we expect adjusted unlever free cash flow after tax to be in the range of $540 million to $580 million, representing approximately 3.3% year-over-year decrease.
Michael McLaughlin: Our guidance for the first quarter ending March 31st, 2025 is as follows. We expect gap total revenues to be in the range of $380 million to $400 million, representing approximately 0.4% year-over-year growth, or approximately 2.1% on a constant currency basis.
Michael McLaughlin: We expect total ARR to be in the range of $1.673 billion to $1.697 billion, representing approximately 3% year-over-year growth, or approximately 3% on a constant currency basis.
Michael McLaughlin: We expect cloud subscription ARR to be in the range of $840 million to $852 million, representing approximately 30% year-over-year growth, or approximately 29%, 29.7% on a constant currency basis.
Michael McLaughlin: We expect non-GAAP operating income to be in the range of $98 million to $112 million, representing approximately a 3.9% year-over-year decrease.
Michael McLaughlin: The press release includes the table showing the expected negative FX impact for Q1 and full year 2025 on a constant currency basis.
Michael McLaughlin: For modeling purposes, I'd like to provide a few more pieces of additional information. First, we expect adjusted unlevered pre-cash flow after tax for the first quarter to be in the range of $140 to $160 million.
Michael McLaughlin: Second, we estimate cash paid for interest will be approximately $30 million in the first quarter and approximately $118 million for the full year, using forward interest rates based on one-month SOFR and a credit spread of 225 basis points.
Michael McLaughlin: For tax rates, we reported a full year 2024 non-GAAP tax rate of 23%, and we expect that to be consistent in the full year of 2025.
Michael McLaughlin: Looking at fiscal 26 and beyond, we expect a long-term, steady-state, non-gap tax rate of 24%, which reflects the normalized taxes in the jurisdictions where we operate and under currently enacted tax laws.
Michael McLaughlin: Cash taxes in full year 2025 are expected to be $70 to $75 million, which is about $5 million higher than our cash taxes in 2024.
Michael McLaughlin: And lastly, our share count assumptions. For the first quarter, we expect basic weighted average shares outstanding to be approximately 304 million shares and diluted weighted average shares outstanding to be approximately 312 million shares.
Michael McLaughlin: For the full year, we expect basic weighted average shares outstanding to be approximately 309 million shares and diluted weighted average shares outstanding to be approximately 316 million shares.
Michael McLaughlin: Please note that these share count forecasts do not include the impact of the share repurchases we intend to pursue between now and the end of the quarter.
Victoria Hyde: And with that, I'll turn the call back to Vic for Q&A.
Victoria Hyde: Before we start Q&A, let me take a moment and step back.
Victoria Hyde: Throughout the year, as I said, we have steady momentum, although the fourth quarter did not go quite as planned. We've identified the areas that need improvement, and we are actively working on addressing them.
Victoria Hyde: The fundamental health of our cloud business and our cloud-only consumption-driven strategy remains very strong, and we're excited to be on track to reach a remarkable milestone for a billion dollars in cloud subscription ARR in 2025.
Speaker Change: With that, let's proceed to Q&A. Great, thank you. Operator, let's open the lines to questions, please.
Absolutely.
Speaker Change: We will now begin the question and answer portion of the call. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If for any reason you would like to remove yourself from the queue, please press star 2. As a reminder, if you are using a speakerphone, please remember to pick up your handset before asking your question.
Speaker Change: The first question will come from the line of Alex Zukin with Wolf Research. Alex, your line is now open.
Hey guys, thanks for taking the question.
Amit, maybe just...
Speaker Change: Help us understand a little bit about retention rates on the cloud side. That was one of the areas I felt like
Speaker Change: I just wanted to get a better understanding of kind of what happened there on these renewal cycles and cohorts. How are you fixing that? And what are you embedding?
Speaker Change: for the full year in guidance, because I think everybody wants to basically understand.
Thank you.
Speaker Change: Given the issues that you face in the quarter, what's the level of confidence and the level of conservatism that you've embedded?
Obviously, on that point, I just ask across the board.
Michael McLaughlin: Sure, Alex. Thanks for the question. Let me take the what happened and Mike can talk about how we baked that into the guidance part. Look, we...
Hyde
The cloud renewal rate, we had two kinds of issues.
Michael McLaughlin: One was more operational, execution, operational issues, and the other one was more organizational, incentive-driven issues. And to...
Michael McLaughlin: We give an example of that look we've identified the operational issues and I'll give you an example of that.
Michael McLaughlin: Look, typically our team, this is a team that has outperformed and has delivered high renewal rates throughout, has a very good sense of what the potential orange or flashing orange signs could be for a particular renewal. And they do a fantastic job of working on it ahead of the time. And, you know, renewals have to be worked ahead of the time, right?
Michael McLaughlin: But a great example is that in some cases, it's kind of like we don't have 100.00 exact precise answers, but we know relatively directionally quite well. A great example is that, look, exact sponsor changes.
Michael McLaughlin: and in a lot of cases, the exact sponsors changed up front.
Michael McLaughlin: Basically, the new person comes in and they have a new strategy, they may delay a particular project or shelve it for a period of time and may want to come at it later, and things like that. And our teams didn't catch it.
And by the time they caught it, it was.
Michael McLaughlin: that particular renewal comes to risk. That's a great example of something that happens as an operational one. We know how to solve it. We know we'll be able to solve it.
Michael McLaughlin: And the other color I'll give is that Not Every Churn.
Michael McLaughlin: is a loss of the customer 100%. In a bunch of cases, it's a partial churn also. The customer said, look, I have other issues going on and I'm only going to do a little bit of it now. So the renewal is not a full renewal, it's a partial renewal. So those are the kind of things and our team does a fantastic job of predicting those upfront and making sure we can make it happen. But in these cases, we fell short.
Michael McLaughlin: Some examples of organization and incentive issues are, in some cases, you know,
You know
Michael McLaughlin: Exactly the example I gave you, where in this case, the success team, the renewal team, and in some cases, the account team had to be
Michael McLaughlin: plugged in together, like if a sponsor changes, the account team would know, but they would not know that the renewal team...
Michael McLaughlin: does not know that, and it's important for them, and it fell through the cracks.
Michael McLaughlin: We have fixed that through putting the right incentives in place for everybody to be working together a lot more. And those are the examples of these are all the things that we know. Again, this is a very, very stable team that has done very well. We have work to do to solve them, but those are examples of that, Alex. I'll give it to Mike to say how we baked that into the 2025 guidance.
Michael McLaughlin: So, Alex, we cited on the preparator marks how much the renewal rates were worse than what we expected, and we've basically pushed that through into the full year of 2025 without
assuming any increase.
that are a result of the actions that Amit described.
Michael McLaughlin: We're hopeful that they will have a positive impact, but we're not putting it in the guidance.
We're going to work.
Michael McLaughlin: as hard as we can to improve those renewal rates. But in 2025, they are consistent with what we experienced in KFOR of 2024.
Got it. And then maybe just as a follow-up.
Michael McLaughlin: projects evolve and technology is changing. Kind of maybe stack rank, is it all three? Is it mostly one of the three? And again, kind of embedded typically after these types of events, there's
Michael McLaughlin: probably, you know, talent changes or management changes that that kind of occur. Have you embedded any conservatism with respect to any of those elements into the guide?
Michael McLaughlin: Many, many questions that actually kind of give you the answer across the board. First of all, the raw demand for us was pretty good. Actually, as I said, this is all tied to renewals. We actually ended the year with the same demand cycle that we talked about throughout the course of the quarter where, you know, incoming pipeline creation or incoming deals that we closed remained steady as we expected it to be. So that did not see anything that we did not anticipate.
Michael McLaughlin: If anything, I gave you examples of how we saw the hundred customers using Gen-AI project that we suited through telemetry. In fact, as we sit here, we're looking at the pipe create, which is.
Michael McLaughlin: We saw a healthy 4X increase in pipe attributable to Gen-AI. The customer said, hey, we are looking at IBM C in the context of Gen-AI as you come to do POCs and demos. Show us that. We are seeing that as we look at the pipe for the first half of the year.
Michael McLaughlin: So we didn't see any any change to that in that area.
Michael McLaughlin: And in terms of organizations, look, I will repeat that we have a very, very well-oiled machine on that side of the world. We have a leader who's been there, who's run our renewals for 28 years in this company, has a team that has performed significantly well, delivering some of the best renewal rates in the industry.
Michael McLaughlin: I think the team has identified the issues, we have made operational incentive related changes. I'm very confident that over the course of the year they'll work it through. Like Mike said, we have not built in any improvement assumptions, we have work to do, but that's the full end-to-end answer to your questions.
Thank you, guys.
Speaker Change: Thank you for your questions. The next question comes from the line of Koji Akita with Bank of America. Koji, your line is now open.
Koji Akita: Yeah, hey, thanks so much for taking my questions. I wanted to maybe follow up on the renewals and so I'm just having a hard time squaring why renewals are a little bit more difficult right now considering that Informatica is
Speaker Change: We view it as pretty mission critical out there. We've heard that from a lot of your customers and partners. So...
Speaker Change: I just kind of don't get it. Is the competition getting better? Is pricing an issue? I mean, Amit, you mentioned other things going on. I wanted to dig into that comment a little bit too. I mean, are budgets being shifted away from Informatica for something else? I'm just trying to understand what is going on with renewals.
Thank you.
Sure, Coach. Look, I think.
Speaker Change: Let me let me further pass through what I was answering for Alex and look, there is always going to be a portion of it that.
Speaker Change: I may not have perfect answers for you today. We did not see...
Speaker Change: As we went through all of it, like I said, we saw a ton of operational execution issues of our own internal that we can fix. By the way, like I said,
Speaker Change: The churn or increase or reduction in renewal did not mean that it was a 100% loss of a customer. It could be partial loss of a particular project or a particular... So the customer may still be with us, but if they had a dollar with us, it may be 50 cents or 75 cents or 25 cents, whatever it is, like mathematically it comes out to whatever average is. There's a lot of that.
Speaker Change: And I've talked to a bunch of those, and we've dug into a lot of those. As you can imagine, Koji, from the first of Jan to now, we've gone through absolutely looking at every opportunity and everything that is in our book of business over there. We didn't see any increase in any competitive dynamic over there.
Speaker Change: and I'm not going to sit here and say it's accounting wise 100% true but we haven't seen anything that that is different than a quarter before or two quarters before or three quarters before in the book of business.
Speaker Change: Like I said, we saw a bunch of little, little things adding up where we took our eye off the ball. And look, the other one is that this is the part of the engine that has come very well. And sometimes we, to be honest, take it for granted. And we tend to focus at the end of the year a lot on the net new business and, you know, kind of close out the year. And while these things are happening, I think all of us
Speaker Change: did not take that, I would say, as we should have done and it happened to us and now we know what to do.
I just add a couple of things, Koji.
Speaker Change: for additional color. Remember, the renewal rates for self-managed subscription cloud came down on a blended annualized basis by about 2%. So, when you're talking about an overall business that's growing six or seven, that has a big impact. But
Speaker Change: It doesn't, in our view, reflect, you know, fundamental change in the nature of the business, the stickiness of the product, or the thesis overall. You can make your own judgment, but that's how we see it.
Speaker Change: Secondly, as we mentioned in the call, the renewal rates in the cloud are still in the low 90s. We're not going to get more precise than that because there's too much noise quarter to quarter versus the signal.
Speaker Change: but it was 2% higher that we expected, but it's still in the low 90s and we think that's pretty good with room for improvement for a software company like ourselves.
Speaker Change: Got it. Thank you, Mike. And maybe a follow-up for you, Mike.
Speaker Change: Why is GAAP total revenue so difficult to guide to? And I know in the press release you laid out four reasons, and two of which I totally understand.
Speaker Change: and the push for professional services and FX. And I guess it's more of the other two, we did talk about renewal rates just now, but also durations as another issue. And so the question is,
Speaker Change: Is the predictability just really hard with the Informatica model? I'm just trying to really understand the gap total revenue guide aspect. Thank you.
Thank you.
Speaker Change: Yeah, look, at the end of the day, it's really hard. And let me just explain why.
Speaker Change: It has to do with the ASC 606 upfront accounting standard.
Speaker Change: And it's primarily around renewals because we don't actively sell any new self-managed. Some of it sells itself, as we've talked about, to government customers and so forth. But that's a small piece of it. It's really about the book of renewals.
Speaker Change: and so if something doesn't renew, and we talked about our renewal rate for self-manage was about two percentage points lower than we had forecast
Speaker Change: It's an outsized negative impact on revenue versus forecast because you're not just recognizing one year of not renewal or there's not a negative of one year, it's
Speaker Change: anywhere between 60 and 75 percent of the TCV of that contract, which was recognized up front at renewal or not recognized on non-renewal.
and those numbers get big really fast.
and the second piece is termites.
Speaker Change: that it's the same basic concept. The upfront revenue recognition is based on the total contract value.
Speaker Change: of the renewed contract. And if it's a two-year deal for 100 bucks a year, that's a 200 TCV. If it's a year and a half, that's 150 TCV. And your upfront revenue goes down by
Speaker Change: that amount or more actually because of the way the percentages work. So it's just very sensitive to those two variables, the renewal rate and the term length.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for your questions.
Speaker Change: The next question will come from the line of Matt Hedberg with RBC. Matt, your line is now open.
Matt Hedberg: Thanks for taking my questions. I guess, you know, on the migration deals, you know, were some of these modernization drills driven by power center cloud addition? And I guess, you know, how should we think about the pace of these modernization deals through the balance of the year?
Speaker Change: So, yes, 80% of the modernizations that we booked in Q4 were PowerCenter Cloud Edition.
Speaker Change: The remainder were mostly master data management migrations, which is an increasing portion of the mix as customers are now ready to move that as well. But in terms of the pace of those in future quarters,
Speaker Change: It's going to be lumpy, and Exhibit A is what happened in Q3 versus Q4.
Speaker Change: of total bookings, more than a third in Q4 was modernization. It was.
About 20% in Q3. Going forward, we have forecast.
Speaker Change: about a 30-70 mix of modernizations versus net new customers and workloads.
before we had the results we had in Q4.
Speaker Change: We were expecting something in the mid-20s, so we've adjusted our forecast to reflect what we now see as a stronger momentum, stronger growth, bigger pipeline of modernizations in full year 25, but the quarter-to-quarter variability will be noticeable. Over the full year, though, we're expecting about a 30-70 BEX.
Speaker Change: And I think, I'll just take a step back again, sorry Mike, on this one. While obviously we are sitting here.
Speaker Change: not meeting the anticipated forecast we have. But modernization, while it has a handicap that Mike talked about in the short term, but as you can appreciate, landing a customer on IDMC has its natural benefit. First of all, with the more deals also come a portion of.
Speaker Change: non-mod NMD because new bookings because customers want to do other stuff also and plus the IPO expansion part of the platform is is a very well-oiled machine as we as we've shared. So it's a good thing it obviously has account other related accounting issues in the short term for us which is you know.
which is what we see.
Speaker Change: Got it. Okay. And then maybe just, you know, on the slightly lower uplift, I think you said 1.5 to 1.7. It sounds like that was expected. I guess, you know, is there any reason to think that that could continue to drift lower in the future? Or do you think that's like more of a stabilized range here at this point in kind of the migration path?
Speaker Change: Yeah, we think it's stabilized, but let me answer the question a little bit more broadly just so everybody understands that movement and how we view it.
Speaker Change: Modernization is a big opportunity, it's a big part of the strategy for Appomattox and we view the economic value of that modernization opportunity on a customer lifecycle basis.
and the customer lifecycle value of a modernization deal.
Speaker Change: has a number of moving parts. One is when or if the customer modernizes it all. So the sooner they modernize it.
Speaker Change: better it is versus later, the terms upon which we strike that initial modernization, the uplist multiple, the amount of credits we give away and so forth, and what happens to that modernized customer after they're on the cloud.
Speaker Change: And it turns out in that third category about what happens to the customer once they're on the cloud, a lot of good things happen.
and Amit referred to this, but I'll repeat it.
The modernizations typically drag additional...
Speaker Change: new books, new booking sales, in addition to the modernization to apples-to-apples requirement at the time of initial signing, so
Speaker Change: They need a hundred IPUs to replicate their modernization. They typically will buy more than that because all of the features on the IMC offer them advanced data quality and governance and data access control, and they realize that there's more great stuff they can do with the platform so they buy more IPUs than would just be required for the modernization. That's point one.
Speaker Change: Second, once they're up and running, the utilization is very good and the net expansion during term is very healthy.
Speaker Change: Again, overall it's 124% and we see that to be consistent with modernization deal as well. And then third and very importantly, we have found now that we have a significant, a sort of what we think is a statistically significant cohort of modernization deals that have renewed, we find that they renew at a much higher rate than a non-modernization.
Deal Dust
because those workloads are implemented and they're sticky.
and they found new things to do.
Speaker Change: So when you put all that together and you put it into the life cycle value equation, we're very comfortable with that somewhat lower
Speaker Change: initial uplift ratio, because that's only a part of the picture. Now, customers don't modernize primarily based on price. We've talked about that a lot, but primarily modernize when they're ready, because there's a lot of planning, there's a lot of budget, there's a lot of organization, a lot of it has to happen. But price does impact their willingness to modernize in a particular period. And so
Speaker Change: On the margin that somewhat lower uplift multiple that we are accepting is reflective of the fact that
Speaker Change: we're happy to get customers to modernize under those terms because of the customer life cycle value of that. We think that range that we forecast for 2025 will be pretty stable, but we're going to continue to look at it every quarter and every year, and in the context of life cycle value, and we may choose to have it be different in future periods.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you for your questions.
Speaker Change: The next question comes from the line of Brad Zelnick with Deutsche Bank. Brad, your line is now open.
Speaker Change: Thank you very much. Amit, I appreciate why you'd look internally at the root causes underlying these results and what's within your control. And the execution issues you've identified, you know, related to renewals, I think we...
Speaker Change: We kind of understand that, but what are you doing specifically to address this? How much disruption is factored into the guide? Because it's common, you know, as we all look at software and various other companies that go through similar things, you know, that transitions like these could take, you know,
Speaker Change: several quarters to get right, especially if you're having to swap out people or make dramatic change.
Speaker Change: So, one comment I'll make and then again I'll let Mike comment on the guide as to how we've taken that into the guide. We actually are not making any disruptive organizational changes.
Speaker Change: The changes that we are not, and I will repeat that, we have a very, very well-oiled renewables team.
Speaker Change: That team has successfully delivered some of the best-in-class renewals for us throughout. And by the way, the leader of that team has been there with us from the very beginning, whether it was when we transitioned from maintenance to multi-product maintenance, to subscription, to cloud, all the way throughout.
So, and in a time like this.
Speaker Change: We've gone through and the team has collectively gone through the whole detail we've been digging to basically uncover the issues, and we have a plan to fix it. Now, as you can imagine, like I said, renewables are not necessarily a part of this. It takes time. So we're going to take that, we're going to make
Speaker Change: The time that we are going to take is to make that happen. And not just make that happen to fix what happened, but also take the opportunity to make the changes to basically take us.
Speaker Change: to a whole level of better execution going forward. So we're not looking to make wholesale changes over there. We are basically, so let me repeat that and for the reason because we know what the team has delivered throughout day in day out for us.
Speaker Change: There are incentives or other process changes that we have made, definitely, like how do we make sure that cross-coordination happens, people have the incentives, so on and so forth, and that's already been baked in, how we are tracking the business and how we are doing a lot of operational and financial tracking of the business at rigor. That has obviously increased the manifold, and that's what we are doing.
That's, with all that stuff happening, I think...
Speaker Change: I'll hand over but Mike just said that we haven't, we have rolled forward what we saw in Q4 for the year for the guide. So we do not do not want to over expect anything to happen sooner. We want to make sure that we are properly giving the time for all those changes to have happened over the course of 2025. But I have tremendous confidence that
Speaker Change: that we will be able to get there as we finish the year.
Speaker Change: And the only thing I can add to that is that, as Amit mentioned, the changes that we're implementing in the
Speaker Change: additional processes and procedures and systems ads that we're making are not disruptive in the way that you're talking about. They're additive. And so I don't see there being a risk of any of the changes that we're implementing making things worse. It's an opportunity to make it better.
Speaker Change: That's good to hear, Mike. If I could ask just to follow up, you know, you called out less tenured self-managed as being higher churn than the legacy base.
Speaker Change: Why shouldn't we expect that the same thing will happen in cloud? Are the new customers in cloud that you're adding going to be less sticky as well?
Speaker Change: It's completely different, Brad, because the self-managed has been end of sale for two years. We're not innovating to it. And customers realize that.
Speaker Change: they have to get off it at some point. And so everybody who is on-prem with us realizes that there's no future in it, and they don't have to move today, and we're not doing anything dramatic
Speaker Change: punitive to force them off, but they have to get off. And so very, very different from the cloud where we are innovating, we have the best products, we have the only platform, we've got a growing market behind us and sticky use cases.
Speaker Change: And to add to that, all of the AI capabilities are available only in the cloud, where customers have the ability on that same platform to do non-AI and AI workloads at the same time. So all the examples I gave on AI, they're all on the cloud. That's not available for anybody on the non-cloud products.
Speaker Change: Thanks for that. That's very helpful and very logical. Thanks for taking the questions.
Thank you for your questions.
Speaker Change: The next question will come from the line of William Power with Baird. William, your line is now open.
Speaker Change: Informed the expectation just a higher concentration. What's informing your expectation for the lower uplift in 2025 or are there other elements at play there? Any any caller would be great.
Speaker Change: Yeah, sure. Thanks. It is primarily about the concentration of that in the mix, but some of it is
Speaker Change: you know price discovery as we have more experience with it uh finding the sweet spot of where we are providing enough uh financial uh incentive for folks to move but not so much that we're just giving away value and not really
causing customers to...
Speaker Change: modernize any any faster. So it's a it's a combination of the mix but you know we actively watch the
Speaker Change: pricing and the pricing behavior of the field in terms of what works and what doesn't to achieve the outcome we want in terms of the pace and volume of modernization. And that's why it's gone to where it's gone.
Okay, thank you. I'll pass it back.
Speaker Change: Thank you for your questions. The next question comes from the line of Howard Ma with Guggenheim Securities. Howard, your line is now open.
Howard Ma: Great. Thank you. I guess for either Amit or Mike, the 40% of IDMC Net New AR that's coming from new customers, can you just clarify, are those net new to Informatica? And if so, can you give some more color on these customers? Where are they coming from? What's the mix of these customers in terms of size or industry vertical? And which IDMC product families are they landing on?
Howard Ma: Well, yes, they are absolutely that new. And by the way, you see in our investor materials the annual disclosure of our cloud customer count.
Howard Ma: and it was up 8% year over year. We're not gonna give that every quarter, but once a year, you'll get a glimpse of that. And that's...
That 40% basically is what counts for the 8%.
Speaker Change: customer count growth. And in terms of the, I'll let Amit pile on, but it's highly varied. It's a really broad, diverse, and I think healthy mix of folks that are
Speaker Change: that are coming to us. I think it's for someone very diverse. It's not a particular industry vertical. Of course, you can expect the core verticals. We have the awardees.
Speaker Change: the company, the semiconductor company that is the most in news with the whole journey I build out, they basically are leveraging our platform to basically manage their visibility into the supply chain. In fact, eight of the top ten semiconductor companies around the world are our customers right now and a couple of them are net new customers.
Speaker Change: So, similar to that, so it's across the board. It's not just financial services or healthcare, which end up being, you know, the largest, this is tech insurance companies, things of that nature.
Speaker Change: And of course, there are international companies as well into that mix as well. So those are the kind of companies. And when you think about the use cases, like I said, it's more use cases than we think of products, because as I always say, multiple products get used on the IBM platform. The semiconductor company is looking to manage the supply chain, and that includes both master data management and data quality, as well as data ingestion, those capabilities. And then some of the other use cases around analytics that includes integration, cataloging, quality, both app integration and data integration.
Speaker Change: Yes please. And you are always welcome to talk with us. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye.
Speaker Change: So, in our case, it's always large customers, not just SMB or lower end of mid-market. I wouldn't say always, but the predominance is the large enterprise. And as you can see also from our investor materials that our average cloud...
Speaker Change: ARR per customer grew 24% year-over-year is now close to $350,000 per customer. So the smaller mid-market customer that needs to do simple data transfer from a few apps to one data warehouse, that's not our market.
Got it, thanks. And as a follow-up...
Speaker Change: The lower uplift ratio, the 1.5 to 1.7 times, Mike, you mentioned in your explanation earlier that there are additional IPUs that are dragged along. If you were to, and I'm assuming that's at the time of uplift, but it's not included in that 1.5 to 1.7.
Speaker Change: If you were to include those, would it make the initial migration whole, if you will, relative to the two times prior?
Speaker Change: Yeah, I think I see what you're getting at. So first of all, the uplift drag, drag along, sounds like a bad word, but I mean it in a good way.
is at the time of signing the initial modernization.
It's not later.
Speaker Change: It's when they first sign up to modernize the workload, they realize there's other great stuff we can do with IDMC, so let's buy some more IPUs to use that additional stuff that's over and above what we need to, apples for apples, run the migrated on-prem workload.
So, hopefully that's clear.
The 1.5, 1.7. Edit, okay, sorry, go ahead.
Speaker Change: At the 1.5 to 1.7 or the historical ratios do not include that additional.
Speaker Change: at time of signing Uplift. It's only the apples to apples on-prem to cloud modernization Uplift ratio.
Speaker Change: That's super helpful, Mike, and sorry for the additional follow-up, but I think the natural follow-up to this is...
Speaker Change: You're guiding to a billion and a billion dollars in cloud AR now, right? I think initially it was probably closer to like one, four. If you were to, because you lose out on a little bit of the cloud AR, like the forgotten amount at time of migration. But as the migration mix becomes bigger, that amount gets bigger. Like if you were to, have you tried sizing?
Speaker Change: How much, I think you know where I'm getting at, if you add on that to be a billion dollars, does that help close some of that gap versus that one-fourth, the amount you get later on upon contract renewal?
Speaker Change: Yeah, look, the 1-4 is, I don't know where you got that number.
I don't want to endorse that, but.
Speaker Change: You're right, directionally, and we tried to get at it in the prepared remarks that
Speaker Change: The bigger contribution that modernizations have to the total gross amount of software, cloud software that we sell in a period, the less that translates into error because of the accounting rule that we have to
That is a
Speaker Change: maintenance and subscription credits that we get for the old on-prem stuff against the new cloud deal for the entire term of that new cloud deal, which happens to be an average two and a half years. So yes, in the short term, the more migrations we sell as a percent of the total, the lower the near-term ARR contribution is going to be, but the greater
the potential to unlock that.
Speaker Change: hidden ARR when it renews. Because the customer is paying the full amount, customer sees the full amount, they don't understand or care about the accounting backend that requires us to show less ARR than they're actually paying. So when it comes up for renewal, if we renew it, even without a price lift, that's a.
Speaker Change: That's an uplift to what the actual contract value is. So the more we do, the more of a drag it is in the short term, but more of a...
Speaker Change: unlock benefit it is in future periods as those things are new.
Thank you for clarifying.
Thank you for your questions.
Speaker Change: The next question comes from the line of Patrick Colville with Scotiabank. Patrick, your line is now open.
Joe Vanderkong: Hi, this is Joe Vanderkong for Patrick Colville. Amit, I think you mentioned 100 enterprise customers using Informatica for Gen AI. What will it take for more widespread adoption here? And then given 2025 is the year of AI agents, what does agentic AI mean for Informatica?
Joe Vanderkong: For all practical purposes, we end up serving enterprise customers. So these are not any small customers that are trying to do any...
Joe Vanderkong: very small use cases. These are enterprise customers trying to solve mission-critical problems and they are in the POC phase right now to figure it out. Like, for example, I gave you examples of a healthcare company trying to basically doing the work over there to figure out a better patient engagement. That's a large healthcare company or a
Joe Vanderkong: biotech company building their own AI framework, leveraging us and Google Cloud to get insights on the internal system. So 100 can be 100 can look small, but when you think of large customers, these are meaningful customers that obviously translates into bigger upside over the course of long term when they go into production.
Do you have a question on the genetic load?
Given that, and I think it's a great...
Speaker Change: Let me remind you, we launched CARE in 2018 when we were in the ML world.
Speaker Change: So one of the benefits of that has been that as we were able to hone Claire over the last many years, when Gen AI came by, we could instantly get to the world of copilots and we could put the Claire GPT out for preview and then it got launched. And obviously we talked about the customers using Claire GPT as well.
Speaker Change: And stay tuned, obviously more coming on the Clare world in terms of many, many more exciting announcements. I think you will basically get to see them at Informatica World, which I'm hoping you'll see all of you there.
Speaker Change: Thanks, Amit. And if I could sneak one in for Mike, how much of Informatica's business is U.S. federal government and how should we think about that segment in 2025? Thank you.
Speaker Change: Yeah, it's less than 5% and, you know, we have no indication that it's any different today than it was yesterday, but we're watching it.
Thanks so much.
Speaker Change: Thank you for your question. The next question comes from the line of Miller Jump with Truist. Miller, your line is now open.
Miller Jump: Hey, thank you all for taking the question. I'll give you the one, but just...
Miller Jump: You mentioned partial renewals and talked about a dollar going to maybe 50 or even 75 cents. Just curious, like, is that something that remains in the pipeline with the chance to recover it? You know, you mentioned no change in competition. So just curious where that is going.
Speaker Change: Yeah, look, I mean, the answer is yes. I mean, our teams don't ever give up. I think that that's absolutely right.
Speaker Change: And I think not losing a customer is a very important thing because it's not like we've had many cases where over a period of time the team will basically work their way back in, present new use cases may emerge for them to basically use the platform differentially. So the answer to that is yes, which is why I
who was important in reminding that.
Speaker Change: Lower renewal rate did not mean that in all cases we lost the customer. In a lot of cases, we just partially reduced the footprint over there. So yes, of course, but at the same time that, as I said, team doesn't lose sight of what the other use cases that a customer.
Speaker Change: And the ability to do that, to recover some of that in future periods is made completely frictionless by the pricing model we have, the Informatica Processing Unit.
Speaker Change: When they reduce or they downsell themselves at renewal, they're not giving up specific products or rights to do certain things, they're just buying less IPUs.
Speaker Change: And later on, when we help them find new use cases and they need more, they just buy more capacity. They don't have to negotiate for a new contract or a new service.
I'm going to start. Thank you.
Speaker Change: Thank you for your questions. The next question comes from the line of Austin Dietz with UBS. Austin, your line is now open.
Austin Dietz: Hey Mike, it felt like we were you know talking about a return to double-digit growth previously and it sounds like you might update that framework a little later this year but just given the 3% constant currency ARR guide for the year like any initial thoughts on how we should be thinking about the overall growth equation at Informatica going forward?
Austin Dietz: Yeah, we're not providing additional guidance on that at this time. What we did say in the prepared remarks is that, you know, we do expect both of those metrics, ARR and revenue, to have higher growth in 26 than 25 off a lower base than we had thought prior to the end of Q4, of course. But beyond that, we're not providing any additional guidance. You know, stay tuned. We do expect to do so later in the first half.
Speaker Change: Okay, thanks so much. And then just on the 2025 cloud ARR growth guidance, you know, for growth to go from I think roughly 34% this year to 25%, you know, next year, here in 2025, it's a decent sort of decel on the growth rate to where, and I know we're sort of talking about more migration deals coming to cloud this year as well. So I think we've hit on some of the factors, but maybe we could just talk through the moving pieces to the 2025 cloud ARR growth guide.
Speaker Change: Yeah, sure. So, you know, we always expected that the growth in 2026, sorry, 2025 for cloud was going to be lower than 2024, right? We had expected 35.5% growth in 2024 and we landed at 34.1.
Speaker Change: even if we've been at 35.5 the guidance for 25 would have been
lower than 2024. So start there.
versus what we
you know, hypothetically, would have guided had we not...
Speaker Change: learned the things we learned in Q4, there are two things that are different that lowered the guidance versus what we would have guided otherwise, and that's renewal rate. We talked about that. And that's higher contribution of migrations to the total gross amount of software bookings that we are forecasting for 2025.
Speaker Change: Those two are the primary two drivers and they account sort of 50-50 for the reduction in the guided cloud subscription AR growth in 2025 versus what we would have done had Q4 ended exactly as we expected.
Thanks, Mike.
You're welcome.
Speaker Change: That concludes the Q&A session. I will now turn the call back over to the management team for final remarks.
Speaker Change: Thank you. Look, I appreciate everybody dialing in. Look, as I said, we...
Speaker Change: didn't end Q4 as we anticipated and of course the fiscal year. Having said that, like you heard from me, we know what are the issues that we need to work on and the team is all over it to work on it. You heard from Mike as we've talked about 2025.
I think
Speaker Change: I step back and I look at it that, in spite of all of that stuff, we actually are walking into 2025 as a landmark year when our cloud business actually hits a billion-dollar ERR mark.
Speaker Change: and with a 120% plus NRR, growing heavily our average ESP, the growth of million dollar plus customers, and of course, with the profitability profile that we continue to have. We remain committed to continuing to execute against our commitments and thank you all for taking the time today.
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Speaker Change: That concludes today's call. Thank you all for your participation and you may now disconnect your lines.